Last Fighter Twin, Great Battle 3, Great Battle 4, and Great Battle 5 have all had their patches updated. LFT´s update re-adds the cursor to the title screen and translates the 2P character select screen. GB3´s update fixes shops when playing with two players. GB4´s update fixes an AI bug that makes some fights harder than they should be. GB5´s update fixes a timing issue that caused only half of the title screen to render on hardware and more-accurate emulators.

A couple of months ago I was talking with TheMajinZenki and a few other folks about the English release of Super Robot Wars OG: The Moon Dwellers, and thinking that it might be nice for folks to have a little context for some of the more esoteric pulls from Banpresto´s back catalog. We got it in our heads that it´d be a fun idea to do all five primary entries in Banpresto´s old The Great Battle series, giving people a glimpse into the history of Fighter Roar, Compatible Kaiser, Dark Brain, and the rest, and we figured that since they were relatively small games individually that it wouldn´t be all that tough to do. The job wasn´t without challenges, but here we have it!

I´ll be posting further updates about the states of various projects tomorrow, but for now I want to give these five games the spotlight. Enjoy!

Release ~ Treasure of the Rudras v2.1Treasure of the Rudras# Posted on June 12th, 2015 06:50 PM by Gideon ZhiToday I´m launching version 2.1b of the Treasure of the Rudras translation. The primary fix here is essentially invisible, but it was brought to my attention recently-ish that when a character casts a spell in combat their strength and agility buffs get altered due to the expanded spell/mantra names. This fixes that and the cursor bug noted in the readme, but it´s only been briefly tested. I´m pretty sure it´s bug free as it´s a fairly small change, but I won´t be confident until more people have played it, so please give it a spin. You can find it in the Extras section of the game´s project page for now.

There are a few other issues minor issues in the game: a mantra hint or two don´t resolve to what they´re supposed to, one person tells you to go in one particular direction when the destination he´s sending you to is in the other, "agility" is rendered as "dexterity" in mantra descriptions, stuff like that. I don´t have an exhaustive list so please report anything like this you find so I can add it to an eventual version 2.2 update. Thanks!

Major Release ~ Dark Half releasedDark Half# Posted on May 24th, 2015 05:52 PM by Gideon ZhiLong has been the wait for a completed Dark Half translation, we´ve pulled it off! Dark Half is one of the games that first intrigued me when I started romhacking, and I consider it a privilege to have been able to give it the treatment it deserves. It´s a unique game with an interesting plot and some unusual gameplay mechanics, and it´s (hopefully) bug free! Enjoy!

Progress ~ Dark Half enters betaDark Half# Posted on May 11th, 2015 10:24 PM by Gideon ZhiJust dropping a quick note to say that Dark Half has entered the beta test phase. The screenshots on the project page are a little out-of-date; they´re pre-edit and I´ve since added a drop shadow. There´ll be new snaps up before the release, which I´m predicting will be some time this month.

Announcement ~ Resurrection of Dark HalfDark Half# Posted on February 21st, 2015 11:32 AM by Gideon ZhiThose of you who follow me on Twitter have known about this for a while, but today I´m making it official: Dark Half is now an Aeon Genesis translation. This is actually a semi-continuation of the work done by SirYoink on the game over the last fifteen years or so; while I´ve completely redone the hacking, the script translation is (roughly) the same and was done by the same person, Eien ni Hen. And yes, the script translation is both done and well-written, so no need for a lengthy editing process.

Dark Half is an interesting beast. On a hacking difficulty scale from 1 to 10 I´d probably rate it about a 6 or 7. The graphics compression is kind of weird and nasty, requiring a creative workaround, and the script has a lot of complicated flow-control embedded in it. That said it isn´t anything I haven´t dealt with before, and it´s handled. The remaining issues will hopefully be fairly simple; they have been so far. The game gets more and more stable every day. It´s not going to be ready next week, but I´m cautiously optimistic that it´ll be done before summer.

Release ~ Lagrange Point 1.01Lagrange Point# Posted on November 5th, 2014 08:33 PM by Gideon ZhiHi everyone, quick update here. Lagrange Point has reached version 1.01. Two fixes here. First, some characters´ STR stats weren´t changing properly at level up; this fixes that. Your saves from 1.00 are compatible though any improper stat changes due to leveling (which should be basically inconsequential for most of the characters) will have been saved to your file. Whether you wish to restart or not is up to you, but the fix shouldn´t impact you greatly unless you saw that Tic had suddenly acquired 255 STR by level 17 and were upset by that.

Second, weapons of type Chemical, Special, and ???? had their types printing as Electric, Plasma, and Sonic respectively. Note that their elements remained Chemical, Special, and ????; this was purely an issue with printing. For the curious, the list initially totaled 28 bytes; I expanded it to 56, but was unaware of overflow wraparound, so anything past the 28th byte started reading again from 0. (AND #$1C -> AND #$38 for the super technical among you.)

Major Release ~ Lagrange Point, now available!Lagrange Point# Posted on October 22nd, 2014 01:07 PM by Gideon ZhiIt´s been more than a decade in the making, but Lagrange Point is finally available! I don´t really have much else to say that isn´t in the readme or on the game´s project page, so I´ll keep this short. Enjoy!

Progress ~ Lagrange Point - Last of ThreeLagrange Point# Posted on October 12th, 2014 06:00 PM by Gideon ZhiLast but certainly not least, Lagrange Point! Betatest has been underway for a full month at this point; I blame Destiny for my, uh, lack of timeliness in addressing bugs. Sorry about that, testers! They´ve reported a total of 228 issues so far - typos, bugs, localization and consistency issues - and I´ve smooshed all but four of them at this point.

But we´re getting really, really, really close to release. Next couple of days close. Updated the project slideshow with 20 new screenshots, but that´s where I´ll end the post; I´ll talk about it in more detail when we release.

Progress ~ Second of Three - Romancing SaGa 2Romancing Saga 2# Posted on October 12th, 2014 05:56 PM by Gideon ZhiOkay, so, Romancing SaGa 2. I´d be lying if I said the project was in pristine shape, and it´d be disingenuous to upload gorgeous screenshots without showing some of the, uh, not so gorgeous screenshots. I´ve replaced the entire slideshow with screenshots indicative of the current state of the project, warts and all. You can see one of the problems below.

That said, these will *hopefully* not be too difficult to overcome. As with SMT if..., there´s a SaGa anniversary coming up soon. I´d really like to have this out then as well, but it´s a bit more of a long shot than SMT. We´ll see.